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About Coast river business journal. (Astoria, OR) 2006-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 17, 2022)
BUSINESS NEWS 8 • AUGUST 2022 COAST RIVER BUSINESS JOURNAL Continued from Page 7 Alisa Burke In 2020, Alisa Burke became a local advocate for public health measures in Seaside. Her petition to declare a state of emergency in the city garnered hundreds of signatures. Two years later, she’s still advocating for pan- demic awareness. She runs a Facebook page, Sea- side Health & Wellness N ews, that shares the lat- est Oregon Health Authority case data to over 500 members. As of August, she still hasn’t returned to in-per- son work. Burke has been teaching art classes on the coast for over 15 years. Hosting art retreats made up a large portion of her income, where she got to spend days teaching people from all over the world. When she began seeing the news of the pan- demic, she announced early on that she would be taking a break from the retreats. “I knew pretty quickly if I wasn’t teaching those fi ve to six retreats, I’d need to creatively pivot to make up for that income lost in diff erent ways,” she said. Burke already had an online presence, off ering virtual art classes. She leaned into it, and took some risks. “This is going to sound like the opposite of like any advice most business people would give, but I felt like — ‘OK , this is a hard time …’ I lowered my prices. Which is something I always wanted to experiment with,” Burke said. She started off ering online classes for $5 , and was able to make more money than before by attracting customers who had never taken an art class before. Burke also expanded her presence on YouTube and Patreon, a subscription-based platform. She has over 20,000 YouTube subscribers. “They’ve grown huge in ways I could never have even predicted. If it wasn’t for COVID, I prob- ably wouldn’t have had time to do that stuff ,” she said. Even though she misses in-person art classes, she’s not ready to go back to business as usual. “Art tends to attract people who are healing, who have maybe gone through stuff ,” she said. She said a lot of her clients at art retreats have ABBEY McDONALD Jennifer Holen rings up Jeff Wischman’s to-go meal at Nekst Event. been cancer patients celebrating fi nishing treat- ments, or people with disabilities. “I just decided really early on: until I can off er a space where everybody can feel relatively safe from COVID — including myself, who has some under- lying issues as well — I just don’t think it’s right for me to jump back in,” she said. Nekst Event When the pandemic began, Chris and Jennifer Holen ran the numbers. They asked how many seats could be causing my Q: What rhododendrons to lose color and droop? A: BRIM’S Farm & Garden 34963 Hwy. 101 Business Astoria • 503-325-1562 For beautiful gardens & healthy animals www.brimsfarmngarden.com Most likely they are not getting enough water. Rhododendrons like an evenly moist soil because they are shallow rooted. If they are new plants, make sure they were planted at the proper soil depth and soak them well to get them fully hydrated. To get the color back to a dark green, apply a chelated iron or Epsom salt drench to the moist roots. Do not fertilize now. You may not have a good bloom set for next spring if they have dried out since this is the time of year next year’s flowers are formed. Look for evidence of moles in the area as they can create runners under the plants that expose the roots to air pockets. Stop in or call for mole traps, hoses and sprinklers. they needed to fi ll, and how much to charge per seat. They decided to take a new approach to restau- rant ownership entirely. In early 2020, they closed Baked Alaska, their restaurant of nearly 20 years. “We chose to make that lifestyle change for our- selves, for our family, for our own mentality. We saw the writing on the wall. We paid attention to supply chain issues, staffi ng issues, all these things,” Chris Holen said. “We saw ourselves going broke … we decided we didn’t want to do that.” “So, we decided let’s create, and I quote, ‘a pan- demic-resistant business,’” he said. The result was Nekst Event, a to-go, small menu spot with much more room to social distance than Baked Alaska. The restaurant specializes in pho, a Vietnamese soup. All day long, customers who have already paid online walk in, pick up their food and walk out. “We could look empty, but be busy. And it’s lovely,” he said. Another unexpected diff erence between the two businesses is the year-round success of Nekst. With a mostly local customer base, they’ve seen steady income instead of the seasonal fl uctuation they’d grown used to. Another bonus has been that with no service, they haven’t needed to hire staff . They handle everything themselves, with the help of their teen- age daughter. Jennifer Holen said they still learn and make adjustments as they go. They started the business with the concept of the to-go only option, then landed on p ho as the main menu item, then looked back at the num- bers at the end of 2021. They looked good, so they opted to close on weekends to spend time with their daughter. Then, later in the year when the Astoria Sun- day M arket started back up, they chose to shift the schedule back to weekends. As of August, their hours are 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Fridays and 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays. “We don’t want to work all the time. W e did that for 20 years,” Chris Holen said. They’ve begun incorporating other services, too. In February, they started off ering ticketed private dining events. The fi rst one sold out within three hours. They set out to make a pandemic-resistant busi- ness, and Holen said he feels like they “nailed it.” “The restaurant business is always such a strug- gle. There’s so many variables, obviously even before COVID,” Holen said. “But this, it’s just perfect.”
